The following relates to the health management arts. It finds particular application in conjunction with out-patient management of chronic illnesses such as congestive heart failure, emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and so forth, and will be described with particular reference thereto. It finds application more generally in conjunction with methods and apparatuses for providing care management for: chronic diseases; rehabilitation from a catastrophic event such as a stroke or an automobile accident; managing weight; controlling insomnia; redressing health-impacting lifestyle issues such as smoking or poor diet or inadequate physical exercise; avoiding potential medical conditions such as osteoporosis or tooth decay; and so forth.
Medical professionals recognize that providing extended-term health care management assistance to chronically ill patients is an important aspect of treating the chronic illness and assuring the patient a high quality of life. Extended term health management is typically performed on an out-patient basis, and is typically wholly or in large part self-administered, perhaps with occasional help from weekly therapy classes or so forth. It is well known, however, that patients often fail to adequately follow the prescribed health care plan outside of a hospital or other supervised setting. This failure can result from lack of understanding of how to perform health care activities, apathy or lack of motivation, fear of failure, or so forth.
Such problems can in principle be overcome by increased one-on-one interaction between the patient and medical personnel. For example, a daily visit to the patient by a traveling nurse could help ensure that the patient is taking medications in a timely fashion and following prescribed dietary and exercise regimens. However, it is often not feasible to provide such intensive one-on-one sessions due to high cost, lack of available medical personnel, or so forth.
In some cases, the patient can choose to access a hospital website or other on-line (e.g., Internet-based) medical database to pull information relevant to the patient's care plan. However, the patient may not have Internet access, or may be unable to navigate a complex on-line medical database. Moreover, providing access to on-line databases does nothing to help patients who are unmotivated. Other approaches that have been used include providing the patient with instructional or motivational videos. However, these approaches do not provide interactive assistance of a type likely to encourage the patient to follow care plan regimens. Moreover, passive videos are difficult to personalize so as to directly address specific issues related to the patient.
Royal Philips Electronics, Cardiovascular Associates of the Delaware Valley, and Comcast Corporation have announced a cooperative effort called Motiva™ to provide a test group of chronic heart failure patients with a remote patient management broadband-enabled platform for connecting the test patients with their healthcare community. The Motiva™ system provides a cable television-based interactive health care management platform, in which content such as educational video, medication scheduling, personalized encouragement and reinforcement, and so forth, is pushed to the patient based on a personalized health care plan. Feedback from the patient, for example through the use of interactive surveys, enables the Motiva™ system to adjust or personalize content to the needs of each patient. The Motiva™ system can deliver personalized health care management assistance to patients on a daily or more frequent basis.
One problem that arises in maintaining such a personalized interactive care management system is time management. Typically, the care plan is organized into content sessions that are presented to the patient on a pre-determined schedule. This approach works well as long as the patient adheres to the schedule. However, the patient may go on vacation, take a work-related trip, or encounter another situation which causes the patient to miss one or more scheduled sessions.
The patient may attempt to “squeeze in” the missed session by accessing several sessions in succession on the same day or over a few days. However, this approach can lead to information overload if the sessions are long or complex, resulting in the patient failing to comprehend important content. Alternatively, the patient may skip a queued session entirely, which may also cause the patient to miss important content. Moreover, in some cases, it may not be enough to access the queued sessions. For example, if the patient goes on a long vacation, it may be appropriate for the patient to review one or more sessions that had been presented before commencement of the vacation, in order to allow the patient to catch up.
The following contemplates improvements that overcome the aforementioned limitations and others.